this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
21 points (95.7% liked)
networking
3056 readers
2 users here now
Community for discussing enterprise networks and the ensuing chaos that comes after inheriting or building one.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fishing wires is a nightmare and is really individualized to each home
Like my house is a modular home built in the 80s so there’s a big cavity in the center of the house where they joined the two halves together. My networking gear is in the basement so getting the first floor wired was pretty simple, but the second floor was much harder. It was easiest to run all the cables up through that central cavity to the small space under the roof and then back down into each room. Took way more cable this way but I did it with 0 cutting into walls
Get a decent quality fish tape. You don’t have to go crazy. Harbor freight has them for like $40. Based on my old place that didn’t have a giant central wall cavity: get good at patching drywall. It sucks but it’s inevitable. Good news is if you’re a homeowner this is a skill you’ll absolutely want to have down
You’ll have to spend a little bit getting a lay of the land. What is current situation, what do things look like? Keep in mind for a house that’s 60+ years old you will run into stupid bullshit (I sure did).
Also consider what you want from your network. Planning things out beforehand makes things much easier. Also remember it’s very viable to buy old e waste networking gear. My rack is filled with stuff I got from recyclers and auctions for crazy cheap. Like my main switch is 48 gb ports and 5 10gb ports and it was $30. My poe switch and my fiber switch were similar. I never spent over $70 for anything.
I ran fiber to key points and spent the extra time running extra Ethernet drops for poe cameras. The latter was a fucking pain but my old place had WiFi cameras and they dropped out all the time. The poe cameras were cheaper, I actually covered all the poe gear by selling the WiFi cameras even though I needed more plus a poe switch, and they always just work. The fiber was a bit extravagant but it’s really nice to be able to send files between pcs on lan basically instantly. I only have gigabit so it’s way overkill but someday if this garbage country ever invests in infrastructure I’ll be ready. I technically can get up to 4gig Internet now but it’s crazy expensive
Wonderful advise.
Out of interest, would you mind pointing out where to find such great recycler deals? Do you scroll through ebay or are there better suited sites?
Sometimes you can find them on ebay but usually the thing that wrecks ebay deals is shipping. A switch for $40 isn’t as much of a deal if it costs $60 to ship to you because it’s gigantic and weighs 30lbs
If you use ebay sort by distance instead price and look for deals.
The best thing though is to find actual recyclers in your area. Look on ebay sorted by distance, look on Craigslist, etc. I don’t fuck with meta shit but fb marketplace is maybe somewhere to look? If you can find a recycler near you that sells direct to consumers (not all do) then hit them up.
Especially if they’re a small business (that’s one of the things corporate overlords haven’t overtaken in my experience), you might find being a repeat customer is helpful to you. I bought most of my networking stack from them but I also got a bunch of stuff to refurbish and resell. They also refurbish and resell but they didn’t do board repairs, just simple shit like lcd and battery swaps. Anything more wasn’t worth their time to diagnose and repair. So I would come and buy their pile of consoles and phones and weird industrial equipment that needed board work, water damage, etc. I could usually fix 6/10 and resell which is probably good for the world and certainly helped my wallet.
But it also meant they threw me mad deals. I have a tape drive for backing up my nas. It’s like a $3,000 LTO8 drive (new) that wasn’t working and they sold it to me for $200 with a bunch of other stuff I was buying. I fixed it by cleaning it and now I have a practical way to back up hundreds of terabytes
Even if you’re not buying up tons of shit like that though just being a repeat customer can be helpful. Of course this assumes you find a good vendor. Some I went to prices were firm even though it was some busted old switch from 10 years ago I could get cheaper online with shipping and they wouldn’t budge. And this was a while ago (like 4 years), I’ve since moved and don’t do business with them anymore. Who knows what the market is like now. I feel like the used market may be surging a bit with tariff nonsense
Top tier advice!
Good tip on going into the attic/under the roof. I'll have an attic in this place so maybe that's the best option to run the wires.
I've patched drywall a handful of times. I'm good enough at it that I can get it done it just takes me longer than it should hahaha.
In terms of what I want... It's going to be 2 work from home stations/desks. These won't move. A gaming setup (this is what I want hard wired the most).
But I also want to have a drop in each bedroom - just in case.
Just keep in mind thing forward. Like at a minimum get cat6. The price difference between it and cat5 is not that much and it essentially means you can wire your house for 10 gigabit, even if you’re not putting the hardware behind for that now. Unless you have a run longer than 180 feet, which maybe if you do weird runs like I did or your house is gigantic
Then think of what you want down the line, even if you don’t have hardware now. I did my camera poe drops even though I didn’t have all my cameras, as an example. Exterior cameras, interior, doorbell, etc. smart home stuff in general if you use it too. I ended up doing so many drops. Planning ahead meant I could fish bundles of cables when possible. Like in my living room I have a few Ethernet devices so I fished 5 cables at once
Oh also get a cheap label maker, will make your life so much easier. Label everything. Label both ends. Label the jack, label the cable, label the front, label the back. You can get cartridges for label makers that are heat shrink instead of labels and will print directly on the heat shrink. This is by far the most helpful part
And just use t568b and be consistent. For some reason I did 568a on a few jacks early on and it was a pain figuring that out. A cheap cable/jack tester is like $4-9 on aliexpress and will make life easier
Great notes on the labels and on the cameras. I wasn't thinking about cameras at all yet, but I do plan on having a couple.